1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to maximizing data visibility. Particularly, the present invention provides a slanted viewer that uses depth as a three-dimensional volume to provide an instant view of full data without compromising the visibility of other view areas or data in the well-established two-dimensional environment and conventional navigation to which users are accustomed.
2. Description of Related Art
A file viewer is an application used for displaying file and directory listings and information. A file viewer may also control searching functions and file type associations (based on filename extensions). A file viewer may also make use of navigational arrows (back and forward) for moving between recently visited directories. This feature has proven to be a useful feature that has been emulated by other file browsing systems.
In the state of today's information technology, the amount of information available grows exponentially, particularly compared to the amount of space that is available for display or visualization. Current display devices are often described as rectangular, flat screens. Very often lengthy data being displayed would be hidden off the screen or viewing area. Currently, this kind of viewing limitation can be addressed by use of commonly known scroll bars in either the horizontal axis or the vertical axis or by resizing the viewing area. Users often manually ‘scroll’ within the viewer to or ‘expand’ the viewer as a means of revealing the hidden portion of the data.
Although scrolling or expanding a viewer is functionally satisfying, it is lacking the instant preview of full content. Furthermore, the aforementioned way of increasing the visibility of one data is in a trade off of lesser visibility of another set of data. This is due to the nature of the two-dimensional viewing facility. If one expands a view area resided in a ‘viewer,’ the area that is ‘behind’ it would get covered up further. The same issue holds true when the user scrolls to the hidden area; things that were visible would become hidden. Lastly, viewing hidden data requires constant manual or human interactions to perform such operations as scrolling or expanding.